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Overcoming a rebrand: SEO (Search Engine Opportunities)

This entry was written by one of our members and submitted to our YouMoz section.The author's views below are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz.

This is not a technical overview on SEO for domain changes but a way to optimise opportunities that this change can bring.

Last summer, our digital agency underwent a full rebrand. From our name and visual language to an office move and a change in staff, we had a pretty big shake up.

I’ll paint the scene a little.

We’d outgrown our old name and visual identity, our previous company name Snapshot Media originated in a front room between a couple of friends. Today (four years later) we are Parallax and have 16 full-time staff and work with some great brands. However, our old name and visual identity wasn't a brand, it was just a logo. We needed to redefine what we stood for and develop a brand identity that we could be proud of. It wasn’t all plain sailing, with a new name came big SEO challenges, but also plenty of opportunities.

Laying down the gauntlet!

Great! Positive growth for the business but what about the impact it would have on our search efforts? Our old domain (snapshotmedia.co.uk) was ranking well for all of the usual keywords you’d expect a digital agency to chase. We had a good domain authority for an SME and some strong backlinks from national press and big media brands. We were set for a new brand identity, a new domain and a new internal digital strategy. To make things even more interesting our directors selected a new name that was used in multiple ways and has 6,600 searches a month, not an easy place to start!

As part of the usual branding process of checking the name rights, domain availabilities and trademarks. Naturally we were keen for the .com TLD, however it wasn’t available. After snapping up parallax.co.uk (which now redirects to our primary domain), we looked at other options. We wanted something unique and innovative to reflect the new brand.

Eventually we decided to use .ax so that our domain would read parall.ax which, (if you were wondering) is the TLD for the Åland Islands.

If you’re not already Googling ‘Åland Islands’, and thinking ‘what and where the heck is that?’ they are an autonomous demilitarised Swedish-speaking region of Finland with a population of around 30,000.

So in addition to an incredibly competitive brand name and no keyword rankings, we now had a bizarre TLD too. We were excited but nervous to see how Google would respond to our choice of using .ax but as SEOs, we were also interested to see if there were any unexpected curveballs appearing.

What happened next?

We had a huge opportunity to make some noise. There were the usual 301 processes of moving domains but the real challenge lay in thinking about how we could rebuild our domain authority, get ranking for our own business name (which is a very competitive keyword) and be found with relevant keywords. We wanted to do this and quickly become an authoritative voice in the field.

We had to decide how the transition would work in terms of directing snapshotmedia.co.uk traffic to our new domain, as well as ranking the parall.ax domain for Snapshot Media searches as a large amount of our traffic came from branded search.

We covered the basics onsite with a solid article about the rebranding process and name change, what it meant for our clients, as well as how it would affect them. We also created a timeline on our about page looking at the growth of the company providing an opportunity to get some on page Snapshot Media keywords down.

Opportunity

Working in search and content marketing, we try to deliver work with the mantra of ‘seeing opportunity in everything.’ If a client has had bad press why not flip it and work it into a story, benefiting domain authority and brand exposure. If you have limited budget and competitive keywords, why not run a story that will cost very little; the simplest ideas can often have the biggest impact. There’s a pretty handy example of this PR stunt we pulled off that received international press.

Search marketing is becoming more and more focused around ‘storyselling’ and engaging content. We had a shiny new domain with an interesting TLD but we stuck with it. It will be interesting to see more businesses take up this approach in the future.

With the rebrand we had something to talk about, a story to tell. We had a new visual identity and a story to share about how a digital agency can manage a rebrand. We found ourselves in Creative Review, .Net Magazine and Smashing Mag, in turn winning some high quality back-links from very authoritative websites.

We also became an authoritative voice in the digital sector after being featured in hundreds of web design award galleries and on industry and trade websites discussing our flat UI. This brought in several leads from the UK and the US. We even had a call from Google HQ who had seen our work and wanted to discuss a project. The point here is that once you have something to talk about, you must manipulate this for a competitive SEO advantage.

As well as shouting about the news of our rebrand and new design to anyone who would listen we broke a big story shortly after to the technology and internet community by discovering a Chrome for iOS bug on mobile which was picked up by the likes of TechCrunch, Huffington Post, Gizmodo, The Verge and hundreds of similar digital publications. Have a search for Chrome For iOS Bug Shows Private Browsing Search History In Google Mobile Search Bar and you’ll see a number of publications which link back to our original blog post about the bug.

Of course, we’ve invested significant time into our own outreach but our blog has been influential in our rankings down the line. With a content calendar and using staff as marketing assets to share their insight and views, we’ve created a blog full of rich content that coincidentally includes many of our targeted keywords.

Results

Six months down the line from the rebrand to the parall.ax domain we’re seeing some great results.

With a team of two in our content team, we’ve seen some big leaps. In that short space of time we’ve managed to get the website ranking #1 for ‘digital agency leeds’ and we’re also now #4 for ‘parallax’. It shows that you can leapfrog your competitors very quickly if you dedicate the resource to it.

We’re also ranking healthily for other keywords and for snapshot media searches which still sends a trickle of traffic through to us. We currently still hold the snapshotmedia.co.uk domain without redirecting from the home page but this will probably be implemented in the next couple of months.

Takeaways

If you have the time and commitment in-house to really hammer your SEO, the rebranding process does not need to be too difficult.

Admittedly we chose a difficult name which put us on the back foot, but it also shows that ultimately it comes down to how important your search rankings are in driving business leads. Here are a few key SEO points if you are going through a rebrand process whether internally or for a client:

Opportunity:You’ve a story to tell and something to shout about. The web is a crowded place but we’ve had many leads come in off the back of our rebrand, a result of the outreach and online PR that we’ve worked on as part of our SEO strategy.

Clear and concise:Ensure that your message between both old and new domains is effective and consistent. From 301s to onsite content, ensure that the message is simple and importantly keyword optimised. You'd be amazed at how many businesses get this wrong!

Rethink Keywords:Think about search users. With a rebrand, you are repositioning the business. We sought bigger clients who wanted to work on awesome digital projects. Lucrative keywords around searching for ‘digital agency’ rather than ‘web design’ are more likely to be the potential clients with bigger budgets. In fact, we’ve worked with some of our biggest clients since the rebrand in the past six months.

Existing connections: Obviously being in the digital industry gave us a bit head start. We’d created over 200 websites before Snapshot Media became Parallax so we had a great chance to experiment with anchor text and back-links in client footers. We revisited many of the older domains that had built up a strong domain authority and experimented with our keywords, which has significantly improved our rankings. Make sure you call on any favours owed during this process!

I hope this insight has been useful for anyone working in digital marketing. Opportunities are always there - you just need to find them.

If you’ve worked on a rebrand project and have any interesting insights, it would be great to hear of your experiences in the comments section.

About robinparallax —
Robin Swire is the Content Manager for Leeds based digital agency Parallax in the UK. He also writes about SEO, digital marketing and branding on the Parallax blog.

16 Comments

I think the most important thing I got from this re-branding story is that you guys focused on developing qualitative resources that helped skyrocket your new brand. It doesn't matter how "out of place" your domain name seems. As long as you create valuable resources, such as the news stories you generated, people will take note of this and remember your brand's name no matter what.

Good post Alex. Sounds like ye have done some great work around rebranding. I have recently rebranded a site myself although the project was a new site so it was more of an initial branding exercise.

I have a more technical question on the subject. After switching to a new url, how does google now view your link profile? Does the link profile remain the same with links coming from original sources or do links not come from the old url?

This was a very useful article for me. The company I work for has just been through a far reaching re-brand, involving our parent brand, sub-brands and our product brands. Also, our new brand name 'Apollo' is widely used and a very competitive word in Google searches.

I think my main take away point from this will be how you told your story via your new site, something I think we could do really well.

Patience is key, isn't it? You can't rebrand, stay at teh top of SERPS, modifying all content and improve your site without a little down time. If the down time isn't worth it, then the rebrand probably isn't worth it either.

Interesting post, I've always wondered about the amount of effort required for rebrand verus the benefit but I've never thought of the impact on SEO before. I wonder how many branding teams take into consideration SEO and digital advertising when naming companies. The following companies maybe didn't:

First - an agency in AUS. Can you imagine how hard it is to be ranked no1 for "First" on Google. And this from a digital maketing agency!

Cuil was a search engine that died, maybe because it was meant to be pronounced cool but on a screen knowone got it. Poor Altavista as well, I loved it but how many people knew how to spell it.

Siemens global engineering and technology must have a headache with miss-spelling.

Thanks for your comment, it's certainly an interesting thought as to whether branding agencies will need to employ SEO staff. Maybe this will happen over the next few years as search becomes more 'understood' outside the SEO community in different sectors.

Hope you enjoyed the article, we're now ranking #3 for 'parallax' since this article was published :)

My digital agency is actually going through a rebrand, so this was great timing. What I took away most was that you didn't setup 301 redirects right away. You left the old site up. We have plans for the content, but had always just planned on 301 redirects for the old pages. I can see the benefit in holding out though and letting the news of the rebrand sink in a little bit. I also wonder if there's SEO benefit by NOT having a new domain skyrocket with a bunch of forwarded links? I think it makes sense provided all of the content is unique of course.

Hi, thanks for the feedback. We were really careful about forwarding too many links at once - we didn't want to cause Google a hernia!

As well as the 301s we have a pretty large client portfolio with lots of client websites linking back to us. We gradually updated the snapshotmedia.co.uk to parall.ax links on client websites and also played around with the surrounding text and anchor text - for example: 'Built by Parallax' / 'Digital Agency - Parallax' / ' Digital Agency Leeds - Parallax' / 'Made by Parallax' etc etc.... this variation has proven to be pretty beneficial - but that's another blog post with the results in itself!

There's a bigger picture of the rebrand here which might be of interest to anyone going through a similar process - particularly from a digital agency point of view.